Introduction

Today, a new stable version of f.el, a modern API for working with files and directories in Emacs, was released after six years!

While Melpa users should not see any difference since this release, Melpa Stable users should be able to upgrade from f.el 0.20 to f.el 0.21 within a few hours after the publication of this blog post.

What’s New?

A few new features landed in f.el 0.21, namely:

• f-change-time, f-modification-time, and f-access-time, three new functions that can help users to deal with the atime, mtime, and ctime of a file. Thanks to Erik Anderson for his contribution!
• f-newer-p, f-same-time-p, and f-older-p, building on the above mentioned functions to compare the atime, mtime, or ctime of to files.
• f-mkdir-full-path allows you to create a directory from a fully written path, such as (f-mkdir-full-path "some/sub/directory"). This is complementary to the f-mkdir function which requires to write (f-mkdir "some" "sub" "directory") instead.
• A shortdoc implementation is available for f.el for Emacs 28 and above. Simply execute M-x shortdoc f and explore your new built-in cheat!

Some fixes, improvements, and clarifications were also implemented in f.el 0.21. To get a full list, head over to the changelog.

It is important to note, however, that support for Emacs 24 is dropped with this release. If you are still using this Emacs version, I urge you to upgrade to at least Emacs 25 – and honestly, you are missing out on a lot of things, just take a look at my previous blog post on what Emacs 29 brought to the table!

What now?

As you can see, only a few things were added to f.el in the six years and a half between the 0.20 release and the present 0.21 release. Personally, I would say f.el is pretty complete right now, with a minimal amount of bugs. Of course, I am not saying we are entirely bug-free, we still have a few issues open on the Github repository.

However, there are still things to do still! Here are some suggestions if you feel like contributing.

Help with open PRs

At the time of writing this blog post, there are four PRs open. You can weigh in if a decision is needed, or you can help in case of technical difficulties from the PR’s author

Implement new features

The issue #18 suggests the creation of f.el functions for chmod and chown utilities. If you feel like you can write such functions, feel free to contribute!

Improvements over existing features

Some functions may not be complete, or may lack some features. For instance, f-hidden-p only works with the UNIX-style of hiding files and directories by prepending their name with a dot, like .file.el or .hidden/file.el. This does not necessarily work on Windows, but so far, attempts at creating a Windows-native solution resulted in failure due to the time required to make a Windows-native request on whether a file or folder is hidden. If you find a performant solution, feel free to contribute!

Documentation improvement

While I don’t have any specific example in mind, if you feel like some documentation could be improved, both its content or how it is presented, you are as well very welcome to contribute to the project.

Conclusions

I became the maintainer of f.el some two years ago, as Johan Andersson, the owner of f.el, lacked time to maintain it himself. It has definitively been an interesting experience. Although I currently have a lot less time to make things for Emacs myself, I am definitively looking forward what will become of this library, and I hope I will be able to accompany anyone willing to contribute to this project.

Thank you to everyone who made this new version possible! Let’s do our best for f.el version 0.22!